OPINION:
The past 12 months have without a doubt been the worst year of censorship our nation has faced, with Silicon Valley’s Big Tech oligarchs taking more liberties with our liberties, brazenly dictating what is acceptable to say and think. By no means is this the first time free speech has been challenged or threatened in our Country, but never before has so much happened so quickly, and never before has the media been a complicit partner in it all.
Over the last year, we’ve seen Big Tech put their thumb on the scale of a U.S. presidential election, censor a president, collude with another president to silence conservative voices, “shadowban” or even deplatform tens of thousands of additional voices, suppress the origins of COVID-19, cancel many who questioned the shifting “science” of Dr. Anthony Fauci, and most egregiously, cover for the dreaded Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the COVID-19 pandemic spread throughout the world.
And this has all happened under the guise of removing and blocking so-called “misinformation.”
These unelected California billionaires must have our Founders rolling over in their graves. Technology has always been critical to the growth of self-expression, religious liberty, and freedom in the United States, but digital tyranny from these so-called unimpeachable arbiters of truth works squarely against our fundamental rights as Americans. It’s a dangerous trend, as social media has become the public town square of discussion in the 21st century.
That’s why GETTR—a new “cancel free” social media app approaching 2 million users—is surging in popularity. On GETTR, users worldwide can engage in a marketplace of ideas on a platform that challenges Big Tech’s control on information sharing and the public discourse. And the past year has highlighted the need to challenge the status quo now, more than ever.
President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and his laptop scandal is a prime example of how Big Tech inappropriately censored users and covered up information. In October 2020, the New York Post reported a bombshell story of potential corruption of then-candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter just weeks before the presidential election. The newspaper had obtained a laptop computer that appeared to belong to Hunter, and it contained information on potential business dealings that his family likely never wanted to go public. In just one of countless damning stories of potential corruption that originated from the laptop, Hunter introduced his father—now President Joe Biden—to an executive from the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.
To make matters worse, Hunter was already an alleged [was it alleged or factual – if he was a member of the Board at Burisma, no need to say alleged, right?] member of Burisma’s board and receiving a salary of $50,000 a month when his father met with the executive. “The blockbuster correspondence—which flies in the face of Joe Biden’s claim that he’s ‘never spoken to (his) son about his overseas business dealings’—is contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer,” the New York Post reported.
When the New York Post reported on the story, however, Big Tech suppressed the news so that it would not circulate among the American electorate, and some platforms prohibited people from even sharing the story. In fact, one of the largest social media companies locked the New York Post’s account for over two weeks after the story was published!
Did Big Tech’s censorship of the story keep it from receiving the attention it deserved? Of course, it did. A survey after the election revealed that 36 percent of President Biden’s voters did not know about the laptop story, and at least 4.6 percent of them said they would not have voted for him had they known about it. That’s more than enough voters to flip Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in President Donald J. Trump’s favor. And Big Tech’s censorship of the American people has only escalated since.
As the CCP unleashed the COVID-19 pandemic onto the world in early 2020, Silicon Valley employed “fact-checkers” to suppress stories questioning the origins of the virus – especially people theorizing that it emanated from a Wuhan lab. But after the theory became more reputable and likely, Big Tech quickly reversed course and admitted that it was possible COVID-19 originated in a lab.
Let’s put a pin in this point. Big Tech social media oligarchs “shadowbanned” and deplatformed thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, who dared to suggest the CCP lab in Wuhan was the cradle of COVID-19, only to admit later they were wrong. Did we then see a tidal wave of social media accounts being reactivated or un-shadowbanned as this mistake was admitted? Of course not. Because these Silicon Valley giants didn’t want you on their platforms in the first place.
As it stands today, the Big Tech oligarchs in Silicon Valley, backed up by their supplicants from the Media in New York City as well as President Biden and his team of Washington, D.C., establishment insiders, believe they are in control of what you can and can’t think. It’s incumbent on the American people, and those who value freedom across the globe, to stand up and start fighting back by loosening the grip of Big Tech on information sharing and public discourse. Joining GETTR is a great first step.
• Jason Miller was a senior advisor to President Donald J. Trump during both the 2016 and 2020 campaigns and is the Chief Executive Officer of the social media platform GETTR.
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